


A Child of the Town

by Alley_Skywalker



Category: Brat'ya Karamazovy | Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Genre: Backstory, Gen, POV Outsider, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 20:22:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14940759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alley_Skywalker/pseuds/Alley_Skywalker
Summary: Lizaveta, especially in her childhood, from the perspective of one of the townspeople.





	A Child of the Town

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SegaBarrett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/gifts).



Ivan Yevgenyevich Shishkin, a civil servant by profession and occupation, was still a young man when he came to the small town which would, some decades later, gain modest notoriety for the brutal murder of the landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. Shishkin, being a man of small ambition and a sturdy personal code of ethics, saw an appointment to a position in a small town to be an opportunity for peace, more than a detraction from his career. He guessed, rather correctly, that his wife, Aglaya, felt differently. She, the daughter of a well-off merchant, had considered herself worthy to marry some nobleman of modest means, and by that acquire for herself a life, not only of relative comfort, but noble flare. Instead, she had gotten him for a husband – a match not badly made, but without the illustrious gravity she had desired. This did not prevent them from having children – at that time there were two daughters and there would be three more over the years. Shishkin was granted many blessings, but raising sons was not one of them. 

Being a good-natured sort, especially in his youth, he soon befriended many of the town’s residents, including a simple but lovely woman, named Natalya, who had a round, plump face, doe-like eyes and thick, black hair always bunched up under her kerchief. Natalya had the misfortune of so many Russian women – to be married to a man who loved spirits more than his wife, his child, or goodness itself. Ilya was known for his alcoholism just as Natalya was known for her meekness and soft-spokenness. Shishkin, being a man of virtue overall and respecting it greatly in others, took it upon himself to befriend Natalya and was successful in his efforts. 

It happened that Natalya had a child – at that time just a couple of years younger than his daughters. Lizaveta was the girl’s name and she resembled her mother greatly, especially with her dark, thick hair. Lizaveta was a very serious toddler and, later, child. She could stand thoughtfully beside her mother in church for the entirety of the service or watch dandelions fall apart in the wind with the look of a revered man of science. She did not brim with the lighthearted joy for life and learning as other curious children – everyone at that time said that Lizaveta was “slow” – but Shishkin noticed that she was very observant and thoughtful about everything she came into contact with. 

Natalya would say that her daughter had a special gift – that of wisdom far beyond her years. 

Sometimes, this made Shishkin wonder if that should be a point of pride. In children such a thing usually indicated great suffering. But he never saw Lizaveta be unhappy. Sometimes, Natalya would bring her over to play and Shishkin would attempt, with no real result, to teach her to read and write, as Natalya was only partly literate. He knew his wife did not appreciate the times Natalya spend in their house or the times he spent with her in the park, but Shishkin was blind to his wife’s concerns. The time went on, the les he anticipated these visits for Natalya’s sake and more for Lizaveta’s, who would always look calmly up at him and show him some trinket or other that had caught her attention that day. 

The little girl showed little emotion, especially of childish exuberance, and Shishkin’s own daughters, even the youngest who was almost of age with her, were reluctant to invite her to their games, though they never teased her, nor did she ever seem to insist on joining in their play. She seemed to observe the world and take it in, but never participate fully in it. And yet she recognized all the people, especially the ragged beggars and the old women. She constantly accumulated around herself a number of stray cats and dogs, though she was almost never able to feed them. Natalya said, with part frustration and part fondness, that if a morsel ever came into Lizaveta’s hands at a time other than when the family was gathered for dinner or supper, she would instantly give the treat away to some forlorn animal – a circumstance both bewildering and endearing. 

“She is the light of my life,” Natalya told Shishkin once at the park while they watched Lizaveta toddle about in the summer grass, chasing after the colorful butterflies of which there was an abundance in the town. Rather, she seemed to more run with them than after them, as she never made an attempt to catch one. 

That was the summer Natalya finally admitted to him that she had consumption.

The next summer, Lizaveta came to see Shishkin with an old bible under her arm. She wondered into the yard with the same calm look in her eyes which would become more and more pitiful and unbecoming as she became older. The other children were beginning to see her as something completely other and some avoided her out of wariness while others attempted to pamper her. All the adults looked at her with pity, although more for her father’s wicked ways, than her senselessness and oddness. The old, pious women cooed that she was blessed by God, and more and more of the townspeople were coming to that conclusion as well. Those of affected or different mind were often seen that way. 

The bible she had brought to Shishkin was her mother’s. Lizaveta had scratched the approximations of three letters into its cover – that was the limit of what he had been able to teach her of writing. The letters “LNI” were the initials of herself, her mother and her father. “Your father too?” Shishkin asked her, a little surprised, knowing what he knew about Lizaveta’s father and his habits. 

At this, she raised her eyes and her arms to the sky, then looked him in the face and spread her arms wide before herself as though to embrace a large number of people or objects. Lizaveta never spoke and Shishkin had learned by then to roughly translate her gestures into words and sentences. This he interpreted as: God is for everyone. He smiled and gave her a large apple from one of the trees in the garden, which she promptly gave away to one of those unruly small boys who roam the streets all day, searching for mischief or spare change on the ground. 

Shishkin never saw her with that bible again. He rarely saw her at church as well, though he looked for her there and knew that Natalya had taken her regularly to the services. But he did hear from the other townspeople that whenever she would run away from her father, she would sleep in the check yard. This became an increasing habit of hers and so she was promptly forgiven the lack of church attendance by all the old pious women, who had been the only ones to truly care to begin with. 

As the years went on, Shishkin saw less and less of Lizaveta. She still came to his house as much as she came into everyone else’s, so that even his wife grew accustomed to and fond of her. But the familiarity with which Lizaveta used to treat him faded away. His own attention turned to his daughters and he Lizaveta slip in and out of his daily life like a ray of sun between the clouds. 

Shishkin was a part of the rowdy group of revelers, many years later, who encountered Lizaveta by the pond on the night that led to the birth of her son. By that time, he was getting on in years and had not seen Lizaveta for a long time, other than briefly and in passing. By that point, she recognized him only to the same extent as she did all the townspeople, both those who were especially benevolent to her and those who only accepted her as they would rain or snow – as an act of God that must be respected, but no more. 

Lizaveta was that night as always – far more comfortable in the arms of nature than anywhere else. Most of the other men in the group were younger, more privileged, more licentious than Shishkin. They were, in theory, his colleagues. One had approached him that afternoon to go drinking with them, saying that they needed men of respected standing like him in Moscow, from where they come. His wife had urged him to go and he had gone and remembered his youth. Coming upon Lizaveta afterward had been sobering. 

As the younger men laughed and teased each outher, Shishkin thought of how he had known Lizaveta as a child. A child who had had always lived with some internal focus and light not known to the rest of them. She had been a child of the town and was now a woman of the world, of all that God created. 

Shishkin knew her son’s father and there was a part of him that could not keep silent in the aftermath, though somehow no one traced his words back to him. No one would think of him as a man of gossip – but it wasn’t gossip to him, but a truth. The sort of pure truth that permeated Lizaveta’s life and that she deserved. 

He wondered how she would be a mother and what kind of mother she would be. It was both a terrifying and an oddly natural thought. Shishkin remembered her as a girl with the kittens and pups that always followed her around; he knew she would always give any food that came to her from the townspeople to the street children. It was not at all the same, but it did make him wonder. 

So he thought, he imagined, he wondered. And he prayed for her and her child to the God who was for everyone


End file.
